Of course, I spent the days as Haim came back into life searching my memory for clues. As more clips came in especially, one every two or so weeks. There was one from a Portuguese lighthouse, the camera finding DO YOU KNOW in rickety letters of scrawled graffiti on its interior stairwell, then THAT carved into the door with a pen, then I LOVE YOU, in girly script near the base of the recreated torch light, then SO MUCH at the end of a sentence in fat black marker by the stairs, the beginning of which, I could just make out, was DRU FUCKS BITCHES. How long did she have to look, I thought when I watched it, to find all of the words in English?
“Don’t you know that I love you?” Charlie used to cry when we were younger, when we still had dramatic arguments that so exhausted us both that by the end we’d just be leaning into one another, and she’d be lightly beating my chest.
The holiday lasted all the way through the fall. As it went on I kept track of her with the credit card bill online, going back and forth between the electronic statement and Google’s satellite search function. But you can’t make a real path out of the random constellation of cashpoints, of obscure historical sites’ gift shops and train stations. At any moment while I sat there in Haim’s room late into the night, while he slept and I bent over the glow of my computer to save him from waking, Charlie could’ve been headed in any direction, could be on any train streaming through the Nordic or German or Russian or Spanish countryside, or in any room of a cut-rate left-bank flat, could be in the company of any man, any woman, any lover or friend or fan or critic of hers from the art world, but certainly not in the company of any child, certainly changing train compartments if one arrived, oblivious, in the company of a traveler. It didn’t mean anything, really, to follow her.
At the end of October I had to get one of the nurses to help me paint Haim’s face with orange, white, and black because he wanted to be a tiger. He insisted on waiting until the last second before the hospital Halloween party to put the paint on, in case “someone who really knows how to do it comes on the ward.” As the play specialists took the kids from Pediatric Oncology around trick-or-treating to the various nursing stations, I watched Charlie’s latest message. It was from the square in front of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. It was longer than usual, almost four minutes. It began with an old, hawkish woman in a long, weathered fur coat singing with an open hatbox in front of her. Her voice was high, vibrato-rich, operatic. DO YOU KNOW, she warbled shrilly, stumbling on the syllables, not looking at the camera, THAT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?
The camera panned out to the rest of the sprawling square, which was gray and empty in the faltering autumn sun. It seemed to be afternoon, and there were hardly any tourists. The many groups of pigeons shrugged in the cold. I sat there in Haim’s empty room with the laptop on my lap and watched the clip again and again, eventually closing my eyes and listening to the long stretch after the woman stops singing, the digital roar of the wind gusting against the camera, thinking of the camera’s closeness to Charlie’s face and trying to hear, in the long space of ambient noise and quiet, the sound of her breathing. I had to stop when Haim wheeled himself back in, crying. His chewing ability had been gradually deteriorating and finally, in one of his first denials, it meant that he couldn’t have any of the Tootsie Rolls he had been given.
By Thanksgiving, when Charlie did not show up, I decided to let Haim watch the videos. Because I didn’t know how much longer we’d be allowed to leave the hospital, Haim and I went to his favorite restaurant, a tacky Italian chain imported from America. I told him about the videos, and asked if he wanted to see them. He thought about it for a minute, poking at his chicken parmigiana, and then said that he’d like to watch them. When we got back, Haim was already very tired but we set up the projector anyway, and he held it on his stomach, watching the string of clips silently several times through, until he was asleep.
Every once in a while another of Charlie’s paintings would sell and I would get an international money order from her with a strange remitter’s address. Because of this, I knew she must be telling her dealer, the one who handled her paintings and finances here in London, where she was staying each time she moved. I knew that if I went down to his gallery in Chelsea, he would probably tell me where she was, and I could do almost anything; I could even go to wherever she happened to be at that moment and confront her, could bring her back, or, at the very least, get a real telephone number with which to speak to her.
But I understood, watching the clips with Haim, strung back to back on an eternal digital loop, that the entire point of this was to avoid speech. That had been her great indictment of me every time we argued, that I made every little thing that should be a four-minute conversation into a forty-minute argument (things which, I knew, in her mind should really even be a forty-second back and forth), that I talked too much, was rude, cut her off in midsentence. “It’s an arrogance,” she said. “You think you know what I’m going to say, but you don’t. You have to think that, because otherwise you’d have no choice but to see that you’re really just afraid that I’m going to say something both true and diminutive about the way you are.” Of course all of this was true. I wanted to keep her bright, quick mind from leaping forward, beyond, with its terrifying ability to articulate with an almost autistic disregard the quintessence of someone as a person. There’re some things, I often thought, that you can’t ever unhear. Most of the time when she said things like this, I told her that I thought it was petty, that I thought we should be talking about more important issues. “What’s a petty problem?” she said. “What else is being married?” And so the video clips were also a rebuke, a punishment. The only way she could live without me talking. The only way she could get me to shut up.
The day after Thanksgiving Haim wanted to watch the videos again. He ended up watching them several times a week, the whole time taking a small stack of secretive notes, as if the clips contained an intricate system of subtle clues with a hidden message only for him. Who were these videos meant for, really? Had Charlie just assumed that I would show them to Haim as they came? I’d told him about where she was after I received each clip, but I hadn’t really explained and he had, self-protectively I think, not asked many questions. I didn’t want him to see that adults could be this way, that they could be so wrong about what love is.
It had been a mercy, anyway, for Charlie that when Haim got sick I didn’t want to talk about it. “Some people talk,” Charlie used to say when we argued, patiently, like she was explaining it to a child. “And some people live.” But during those long months of the holiday, I thought about how it was dying that was really the anti-speech. The great authors in their twilight produce books that grow shorter and shorter, and nobody has much to say about a child with a terminal brain tumor watching the first snow of the year collect on his windowsill. The story refuses to assemble itself. Dying defeats all plot. What would I possibly have had to say to Charlie, even if we did talk?
On the first night of Chanukah I found out one of the nurses on the ward had been giving Charlie information. I had assumed somebody was. I thought about complaining, putting a stop to it. People should have to earn information about the terminally ill, I thought. People should have to come here and stare into the face of it. I didn’t want her to come swooping in if things got bad all of a sudden, as if she’d been here all along. I just wanted her to come home.
The mothers were here by then. I’d set them up in a small flat that they could share near the hospital when they visited. They were both quiet, nervous women, and for most of our marriage they had harbored a congenital dislike of each other, but they had been united in the cause of a sick grandchild and were mostly glad, now that we’d put an ocean between our little family and them, for the chance to see Haim. The nurses and the other families, who, of course, all knew my and Haim’s story, knew about Charlie leaving, were glad to see the mothers around, and gave me big, knowing grins every time they saw me. I couldn’t talk to any of them.